Is asking questions a crime? If you develop doubts about the
Holocaust, isn’t the only way to get rid of these doubts by asking questions?
A lot of individuals and groups are enraged by those who ask critical questions
about the Holocaust. These doubters, who call themselves Revisionists, are often
defamed as "Holocaust deniers."

Every other historical issue is debated as a matter of
course, but influential pressure groups have made the Holocaust story an
exception. Anyone should be encouraged to investigate critically the Holocaust
story in the same way they are encouraged to investigate every other historical
event. This is not a radical point of view. The culture of critique was
developed millennia ago by Greek philosophers like Socrates, and was renewed
centuries ago during the Enlightenment.

THE HISTORICAL ISSUE

Revisionists agree with establishment historians that the
German National Socialist State singled out the Jewish people for special and
cruel treatment. In addition to viewing Jews in the framework of traditional
anti-Semitism, the National Socialists also saw them as being an influential
force behind international communism and behind the so-called international
"finance capital," which they held responsible for the worldwide
economic crisis and for the impoverishment of German workers. During World War II, Jews were considered
to be enemies of the German State and a potential danger to its war efforts,
much like the Germans, Italians, and Japanese were viewed in the U.S.
Consequently, Jews were stripped of their rights, forced to live in ghettos,
conscripted for labor, deprived of their property, deported, and otherwise
mistreated. Many tragically perished.

In contrast to establishment historians, Revisionists claim
that the German State had NO policy to exterminate the Jewish people (or anyone
else) in homicidal gas chambers or by killing them through abuse or neglect.
Revisionists also maintain that the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an
irresponsible exaggeration, and that no execution gas chambers existed in any
camp in Europe which was under German control. Fumigation gas chambers, both
stationary and mobile, did exist to delouse clothing and equipment to prevent
disease at POW, labor, and concentration camps and at the fighting front. It is
highly likely that it was from this lifesaving procedure that the myth of
extermination gas chambers emerged.

Revisionists generally hold that the Allied governments,
and in particular the Soviets, decided to carry their wartime "black
propaganda" of German monstrosities over into the postwar period. This was
done for essentially three reasons. 1. The Allies felt it necessary to continue
to justify the great sacrifices that were made in fighting two world wars. 2.
The Allies wanted to divert attention from, and to justify, their own
particularly brutal crimes against humanity. Soviet atrocities alone caused
the death of uncounted millions of civilians in the Soviet Union and in all
countries of eastern and central Europe. American and British saturation
bombings of German and Japanese cities causing over a million civilians to be
burned or buried alive. 3. The Allies needed justification for postwar
arrangements involving the total dismantling of German industry, a policy of
starvation causing the deaths of many millions of German civilians, the robbing
of German patents worth trillions of dollars, and the annexation of large parts
of Germany into Poland and the USSR. These territories were not disputed
borderlands but consisted of 20% of the entire German territory. The twelve
million Germans living in these regions were robbed of their property and
brutally expelled. More than two millions perished during this most heinous
ethnic cleansing of world history.

During the war, and in the postwar era as well, Zionist
organizations became deeply involved in creating and spreading Holocaust
stories. Their purpose was to drum up world sympathy and support for Jewish
causes, especially for the creation of the State of Israel. Today, the Holocaust
story, which is perceived as a crime of a right-wing regime, plays an important
role for leftist-internationalist groups, for Zionist organizations, and for
groups within Jewish communities. It is the leaders of these political and
propaganda organizations who continue to work to sustain the orthodox Holocaust
legend and the myth of German monstrosity during World War II.

Those who claim that these interpretations are anti-Jewish
are reading into them something which simply is not there. Revisionists do not
claim that Jewish leaders or organizations did anything in the war and postwar
era which the Allied Governments themselves did not do.

For those who believe that the Nuremberg Trials revealed
the truth about German war crimes, it is a terrible shock to discover that the
then Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, described the
Nuremberg court as "a high-grade lynching party" for Germans (Alpheus
T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law, New York: Viking,
1956, p. 716).

The Photographs

We’ve all seen "The Photographs." Endlessly.
Newsreel photos taken by U.S. and British photographers at the liberation of
the German camps, and especially the awful scenes at Dachau, Buchenwald, and
Bergen-Belsen. For instance, look at the one at the top of this leaflet. These
photos and films are usually presented in a way in which it is either stated or
implied that the scenes resulted from deliberate German policies. The
photographs are real, but their interpretation is false.

Even mainstream historians admit that there was no German
policy at any of those camps to kill the internees. In the last months of the
war, while Soviet armies were invading Germany from the east, British and U.S.
bombers were destroying every major city in Germany with saturation bombing.
Transportation, the food distribution system, medical, and sanitation services
all broke down. That was the purpose of these air raids, which was the most
barbaric form of warfare in Europe since the Mongol invasion.

Millions of refugees fleeing the Soviet armies were pouring
into central and western Germany. As a result of the ongoing war, of starvation,
and epidemics, millions of civilians were dying all over Germany. The camps were
not exempted from this tragedy. Camps that were still under German control were
overcrowded with internees evacuated from the east. By early 1945, these inmates
suffered from malnutrition and epidemics like typhus and cholera, to which
many succumbed. When the press entered the camps with British and U.S. soldiers,
they found the results of that. They took "The Photographs."

Still, at camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen tens of thousands of relatively healthy internees were
liberated. They were there in the camps when "The Photographs" were
taken. There are newsreels of these internees walking through the camp streets
laughing and talking. Others picture exuberant internees throwing their caps
in the air and cheering their liberators. It is only natural to ask why you
haven’t seen those particular films and photos while you’ve seen the others
hundreds of times.

Documents

It is often claimed that there are "tons" of
captured German documents proving the Jewish genocide. When challenged on this,
however, only a handful of documents are produced, the authenticity or
interpretation of which is highly questionable. If pressed for reliable
documentation, it is then claim that the Germans destroyed all the relevant
documents to hide their evil deeds, or the absurd claim is made that the Germans
used code language, whispered verbal orders, or conveyed orders through a
meeting of minds.

As a matter of fact, all available documentation and material
traces indicate that there was no order for a mass murder of Jews, no plan, no
budget, no weapon—that is, no gas chamber—and no victim—that is, not a
single autopsied body has been shown to have been gassed.

Eyewitness Testimony

During medieval witch trials, many witnesses told similar
accounts about broom-riding witches and the devil. Since most statements were
made independently of each other and without pressure, this was taken as
evidence that the stories must be true; material evidence was never produced.
"Common knowledge," a word invented in those days, and social
expectations formed the basis of these accounts, not the truth.

Today, we face the same "common knowledge" produced
by 60 years of one-sided mass media propaganda and massive social and sometimes
even legal pressure to conform to certain views. To support their theories,
anti-Revisionists depend almost exclusively on "eyewitness" testimony
produced in this poisoned atmosphere.

During the war crimes trials many "eyewitnesses"
testified that Germans made soap out of human fat and lamp shades from human
skin. Allied prosecutors even produced evidence to support these charges. For
decades, highly respected scholars at the most prestigious universities in the
world sanctioned these stories, leading us to believe that such stories were
"irrefutable truths." But within time, many such stories have become
untenable: In 1990, Yehuda Bauer, director of Holocaust studies at Hebrew
University, Tel Aviv, admitted: "The Nazis never made soap from Jews…"
(Jerusalem Post, Int. Ed., 5 May 1990, p. 6).

Bruno Baum, a former communist inmate in Auschwitz, was
allowed to brag in summer 1945 in a Soviet newspaper: "The whole propaganda
which started about Auschwitz abroad was initiated by us [German communist
inmates] with the help of our Polish comrades." (Deutsche Volkszeitung,
Soviet paper in occupied East Germany, 31 July 1945). Thus, it is not surprising
to learn that during several trials in Germany, it emerged that the testimony of
witnesses from eastern Europe had been orchestrated by communist authorities.

During a trial against an alleged former camp guard in
Jerusalem, even the Israeli court had to admit that all witness testimony
was not credible, which resulted in the defendant’s acquittal.

The only two witnesses who were ever cross-examined had to
admit in 1985 that their accounts were not true: Arnold Friedman confessed of
never having experienced what he had claimed, and Rudolf Vrba admitted of having
used poetic license to "embellish" his statements. Vrba is one of the
most famous Auschwitz witnesses. However, once asked if all claims Vrba had made
about Auschwitz in the famous movie Shoa were true, Vrba replied: "I
do not know. I was just an actor and I recited my text." He told this with
a sardonic smile to his Jewish friend Georg Klein (G. Klein, Pietà,
Stockholm, p. 141).

During and after the war there were "eyewitnesses"
to mass gassings at Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and other camps in
Germany proper. Today, virtually all recognized scholars dismiss this testimony
as false.

Establishment historians, however, still claim that mass
gassings happened at several camps in Poland. The evidence for this claim is, in
reality, qualitatively no different to the false testimony and evidence for the
alleged mass gassings at the camps in Germany proper.

With regard to confessions by Germans at war crimes trials,
it is now well documented that many were obtained through coercion,
intimidation, and even physical torture, just like during the medieval witch
trials.

Auschwitz

In 1990, the Auschwitz State Museum revised the old propaganda
claim of four million murdered humans down to one million—base not upon facts,
but upon estimates! In 1994, a French scholar reduced this figure further down
to less than 700,000, and in 2002, another mainstream Holocaust scholar reduced
the Auschwitz death toll to 500,000—again not based on facts, but on
"estimates."

The Auschwitz Museum has put on display piles of hair, boots,
and eyeglasses, etc., but there is neither evidence for the origin of these
items nor for the fate of their former owners. While such displays are effective
propaganda, they are worthless as historical artifacts.

In a videotaped interview, the Auschwitz Museum authorities
admitted that the gas chamber shown to tourists is a "reconstruction,"
again not based on facts, but only on unverified eyewitness claims. The Museum’s
tourist guides, however, tell visitors that all they see is genuine…

Whereas some mainstream scholars claim that the Auschwitz
crematories, whose morgues supposedly served as gas chambers, were the
"absolute center" in the "geography of atrocities," other
mainstream scholars claim that the mass murder did not take place in those
crematories, but elsewhere. Revisionist, however, want certainty, not
speculations and estimates.

Jewish Population Losses During World War II

Only two monographs were written so far on the question of
how many Jews lost their lives during World War II. The first is a revisionist
book concluding that some 300,000 perished. The second is authored by several
recognized historians claiming that some six million died. Whereas the
Revisionist book takes into consideration demographic changes of the Jewish
population in all countries, the mainstream book compiles its figures by simply
subtracting the number of Jews alive in Europe a few years after the war from
those alive in Europe several years before the war. It ignores that the Jewish
population in America, Israel, and other countries outside of Europe had
increased by almost six million in this period of time, as a result of a new
Exodus. Thus, those who had left Europe were simply declared to be Holocaust
victims.

The Hidden Genocide

Those who promote the Holocaust story complain that "the
whole world" was indifferent to the genocide which allegedly was occurring
in German occupied Europe. They claim that this was due to some great moral flaw
in the nature of Western man, or that people did not realize the enormity of
what was happening. It is true that the world responded with indifference. But
perhaps it was because they did not believe it.

It is certain that if there had been "killing
factories" in Poland murdering millions of civilians, then the Red Cross,
the Pope, humanitarian agencies, the Allied governments, neutral governments,
and prominent figures such as Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Eisenhower, and many
others would have known about it and would have often and unambiguously
mentioned it, and condemned it. They did not! The promoters admit that only a
tiny group of individuals believed the story at that time—many of whom were
connected either with Jewish or with Communist propaganda agencies. The rise of
the Holocaust story reads more like the success story of a PR campaign than
anything else.

Winston Churchill wrote his six volume work The Second
World War without mentioning a program of mass-murder and genocide. In his
book Crusade in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower also failed to mention gas
chambers. Was the weapon used to murder millions of Jews unworthy of a passing
reference? Was our future president being insensitive to Jews?

Examples of Propaganda

During and after the First World War, that is between
1916 and the late 1920s, mainly American Jewish organizations were claiming that
six million Jews(!) would suffer terribly in poverty stricken Eastern
Europe. In this context, it was claimed that eastern European Jewry would face a
Holocaust if they did not receive massive funding. With such propaganda,
millions of dollars were raised in the United States, which at the end were
mainly used to finance the Soviet revolution in Russia.

On 22 March 1916, that is during the First World War,
the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph published an article falsely
claiming that the Germans had murdered 700,000 Serbs in gas chambers. On 25 May
1942, that is during the Second World War, the same newspaper reported
that the Germans had murdered 700,000 Jews in Poland in gas chambers.

How can we tell that the second story is true, if we know
that the first is a lie? In 1944, the British Government asked the British media
and churches to help spread anti-German propaganda, which it had been putting
out already for a while, in order to distract from the atrocities it expected to
be committed by the Soviets as soon as they invade Germany. In its circular, the
British government expressed its regret that, after the exposure of WWI
propaganda lies, greater efforts would be necessary to succeed this time.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND REVISIONISM

Many people are bewildered when they first hear Holocaust
Revisionist arguments. The arguments appear to make sense, but "How is
it possible?" The whole world believes the Holocaust story. It’s just not
plausible that so great a conspiracy to suppress the truth could have functioned
more than half a century.

To understand how it could very well have happened, one
needs only to reflect on the intellectual and political orthodoxies of medieval
Europe, or those of National Socialist Germany or the Communist-bloc countries.
In all of these societies the great majority of scholars were caught up in the
existing political culture. Committed to a prevailing ideology and its
interpretation of reality, these scholars and intellectuals felt it was their
right, and even their duty, to protect every aspect of that ideology. They did
so by oppressing the "evil" dissidents who expressed
"offensive" or "dangerous" ideas. In everyone of those
societies, scholars became the "Thought Police."

In our own society, in the debate over the question of
political correctness, there are those who deliberately attempt to trivialize
the issues. They claim that there is no real problem with freedom of speech in
our society, and that all that is involved with PC are a few rules which would
defend minorities from those who would hurt their feelings. There is, of course,
a deeper and more serious aspect to the problem. In American society today there
is a wide range of ideas and viewpoints which the mass media will not allow to
be discussed openly. Even obvious facts and realities, when they are
politically unacceptable, are denied and suppressed. One can learn much about
the psychology and methods of the Thought Police by watching how they react
when just one of their taboos is broken and Holocaust Revisionism is given a
public forum.

First they express outrage that such "offensive"
and "dangerous" ideas were allowed to be expressed publicly. They
avoid answering or debating these ideas, claiming that to do so would give the
Revisionists a forum and legitimacy. Then they make vicious personal attacks
against the Revisionist heretics, calling them political names such as
"hater," "denier," "anti-Semite,"
"racist," "terrorist," or "neo-Nazi," even
suggesting that they are potential mass murderers. They publicly accuse the
Revisionists of lying, but they don’t allow the dissenters to hear the
specific charge against them or to face their accusers so that they can answer
this slander.

Revisionists are frequently accused of being hate filled
people who are promoting a doctrine of hatred. But Revisionism is a scholarly
process, not a doctrine or an ideology. If the Holocaust promoters really want
to expose hatred, they should take a second look at their own doctrines, and a
long look at themselves in the mirror.

Anyone who invites a Revisionist to speak publicly is himself
attacked for being insensitive. When Revisionists do speak publicly, they are
regularly shouted down and threatened. Libraries and bookstores face
intimidation when they consider handling Holocaust revisionist materials. All
this goes on while the majority of library, media, college, and university
administrators sit silently by, allowing political activists to determine what
can be said in the media and read in libraries.

Next, the Thought Police set out to destroy the transgressor
professionally and financially by "getting" him at his job or
concocting a lawsuit against him. It is sometimes often deceptively claimed that
Revisionist scholarship has been proven false during a trial, though courts of
law can never decide any scholarly debates; they can only impose dogmas.

Finally, the Thought Police will inevitably "straighten
out" that segment of academia or media that allowed the Revisionists a
forum in the first place.

Some administrators in academia hold that university
administrations should take action to rid the campus of ideas which are
disruptive to universities. This is an open invitation to tyranny. It means that
any militant group with "troops at the ready" can rid the campus of
ideas it opposes and then impose its own orthodoxy. Coward administrators might
find it much easier and safer to rid the campus of controversial ideas than to
face down a group of screaming militants. But it is the duty of university
administrators to insure that our universities remain a free marketplace of
ideas. When ideas cause disruptions, it is the disrupters who must be subdued,
not the ideas.

CONCLUSION

The influence of Holocaust Revisionism is growing steadily
both here and abroad. In the United States, Revisionism was launched in
earnest in 1977 with the publication of the book The Hoax of the Twentieth
Century by Arthur R. Butz. Professor Butz teaches electrical engineering
and computer sciences at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Those who take up the Revisionist cause represent a wide
spectrum of political and philosophical positions. They are certainly not the
scoundrels, liars, and demons the anti-Revisionists try to make them out to be.
The fact is, there are no demons in the real world. People are at their worst
when they begin to see their opponents as an embodiment of evil, and then begin
to demonize them. Such people are quite prepared to harm their opponents. The
logic of their argument is that you can do anything you want to a demon. We
should not allow such a logic to prevail.

If you wish to learn more about Holocaust revisionism, we
recommend our free brochure with answers to the most
frequently asked questions and links to articles and entire books available on
this topic. Those wishing to verify the truthfulness of the
statements
made above, can visit our vast Internet database at www.vho.org and download
many scholarly articles and books about this topic, including many references to
primary sources, forensic research, and much more.